Wayland after 8(ish) months

2023/06/18

I originally wrote this article in october 10th 2022. It is now june 2023 and I feel like not much has changed. I originally postponed this article because I felt like I had just started using wayland and I didn’t have too much to say about its stability. Well now I do.

Ah, Wayland. We’ve been hearing about this since the good old days. I think I first heard of it around 2016 or so. At the time, I remember trying Wayland, and even though I feel like it was defaulting to it, online posts say I’m wrong. Anyway, I think those days were around GNOME 3.22? Or 3.24? Definetly in 3.28, which was around the time where gnome 3 was at its lowest point. I remember writing multiple orgmode files ranting about GNOME and Arch Linux in general, how they messed my setup in different ways. GDM once broke bluetooth, GNOME was sluggish, python updates broke stuff. Good times though, I think I learned the basics of my system around those times.

Anyway, like everyone else in the Linux world, I’ve heard over and over how wayland breaks everything and how there are these special use cases where it cannot do whatever some dude did with their computer. Side note: I’ve always found it kind of cool to know the weird things people do with their computers. I’ve heard of some sick accessibility tricks, making their text editors talk to them, point the mouse for them, run some weird kind of automation that just works for their workflow. I find it really cool to read those, and an interesting thing is that Wayland has brought people to write about it somehow.

I originally intended to just make a wiki page for Wayland (will probably write it anyway), detailing what works, what doesn’t and stopping there. But researching articles that talk about wayland I decided to make my own. I’ll talk about it later, but I feel like these are good times for Linux, there’s a really vibrant community pushing forward, and while this article isn’t as detailed and well thought out like the ones I’ll list below, I feel like it’s my tiny contribution to this ecosystem.

And so, if you stumble upon this article, this could be a starting point. I don’t use anything fancy so this might help set a base system.

The story

If you look at my github, you’ll notice that I have an old emacs repo (side note: I put so much effort into that repo. Crazy.). You don’t have to know, but in the good old days, you’d use Flycheck for linting and syntax errors. It really was ahead of its time if you consider that we didn’t have LSP or anything standardized. Anyway, the guy that created it always caught my attention with his tweets and the things that he wrote, not only about emacs, but about work and everyday tech life.

So one day I found myself procrastinating as usual and decided to take a look at his blog, because I hadn’t looked at it since before the pandemic, and I found that he had moved away from macOS into Arch Linux, he has a really cool setup for an encrypted system. Something that I’ve been looking away for a couple of years now. I thought the setup was incredible and decided to move on to Wayland. I don’t even know why. I’m pretty sure he’s using GNOME in x11, but I don’t know. Maybe his setup looks so futuristic and that’s what inspired me to move to something newer.

After that I tried GNOME for a couple days only to find out that if I’m not in a laptop, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. And then proceeded to try Hyprland for a couple of days. I liked it, but found some bugs/features that I don’t really like: You can’t cycle through your workspaces like you can in pretty much any other WM, it crashes every other day. Not so frequent you’d switch immediately, but frequent enough to make you hate it every 2 or 3 days. There are some more, like gui glitches with xwayland and sometimes windows don’t tile back into position after you close one of them.

So I moved on to sway, which is very stable. It’s just not dynamic… good enough for the time being, because I’m using it for everyday work and I need things not to crash and to behave well.

And that’s it, my current unfinished setup is below, with the notes I need for the future

What works

So these apps replace something else I had in X11 world or they solve a need I didn’t know I had.

What works but should be replaced

What doesn’t work or needs way too many workarounds

My overall Wayland experience after 8ish months

Well, as I said in the beginning of this article, I wrote most of these words the first week after moving to wayland, but since then I’ve been daily driving it with great success, but not without its quirks.

On the initial days, Sway used to crash once or twice a week. I never really found out why, and to be honest it was really annoying. I’d be working and all of a sudden I would get thrown out to the tty. Some of those crashes might have had something to do with memory issues since I didn’t have a swap set up. Sway has updated several times since then and now I do have a swap, so lately I haven’t had crashes at all. Works fine.

Then, one of the most challenging aspects of moving to sway for me was getting used to a manual tiler setup. I prefer dynamic tiling way more than this, but I haven’t had good experiences with anything other than Sway. So I had to adjust my workflow to get used to sway and its ways. Honestly it’s not as bad as long as I don’t open more than 2 windows in a workspace without being tabbed. Not as powerful as dwm/awesomewm, but good enough.

After seeing the stability on my daily usage with firefox, foot and spotify, I started to push the system to open challenging applications: dbeaver, datagrip, steam and even some games, some via lutris+wine and others via steam. I was astonished at how good the support overall was. I didn’t even have to tweak anything. Everything just worked. This aspect is GREAT.

The last point really goes to show how mature Wayland is. Totally stable for me, even for daunting tasks like playing 4k games through xwayland. After this I don’t see myself going back to Xorg, even if awesomewm and dwm are superior in the workflow aspect of it.

Resources

Oh man. There’s something I love about wayland and it’s that it generates controversy, it gets people talking about it. With a clever search (because google for some reason doesn’t like personal blogs) you can find dozens of articles of people explaining how they set up wayland. What works and what does not. Some describe with great detail how to make some things work. Every time I search something, I really do feel like there’s a vibrant community of people working to make this ecosystem better, and I love it. And so I will link to those pages that make our community better.

Applications and things to try out

Articles, rants, how-tos, tutorials, blogs

A stupid footnote

Oh man. I love having an AMD GPU, lmao.